Donald Trump has won the election in a very convincing fashion, becoming the first president to serve two non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century. Once again, the polling managed to underestimate just how popular Trump still is with the American electorate, despite all the setbacks, gaffes and scandals. None of these things turned out to matter very much as they cast their ballots, and it is notable that Trump seems on course to win the popular vote.
In one sense, the magnitude of Trump’s political victory seems much greater than in 2016. He has survived the various attempts at prosecuting him or rendering him untouchable. He has beaten back every challenger within the party, securing the nomination in the contested GOP primary, often with quite brutal margins of victory over the rest of the field. Old-guard figures like Mitch McConnell, the longest-serving senate leader in US political history, have seen the way the wind is blowing, and McConnell will step down from his role in January, just as the Republicans have regained control of the senate. Trump’s enemies in the Democrats have been thoroughly crippled by their spectacularly bad result in the election, but also by the incredibly chaotic and delegitimising lead-up to it. Not only did the Democrats fail to contest Joe Biden’s decision to run again despite his advanced age, their belated political coup against him was messy and disorganised, came very late and embarrassed everyone involved. A period of recrimination and blame-shifting is almost certain to begin inside the Democratic party; it might last for quite a while. Behind Trump, a humbled Republican party has, yet again, been browbeaten back into obedience. In front of Trump, a Democratic party finds itself confused, disorganised and at war with itself.
But even in the face of what on the surface appears like a very auspicious set of political conditions, expectations for the incoming Trump administration are mixed at best. For there is one enemy Trump faces that has never been humbled nor disorganised by the result of an election: the American “deep state” and civil service. The first Trump term was badly wounded both by fights internal to his own administration (the conflict with John Bolton being only one among many) and between his administration and the generals, professionals and bureaucrats that maintain America’s state institutions at home and its military footprint abroad. In many cases, Trump lost these battles outright: famously, he wanted an earlier US withdrawal from Syria, only to be stonewalled and led in circles by the military officials who were, in theory, only there to implement directives from their civilian leadership.
Against this apparatus, Trump sports no clear advantage in 2024 as compared to 2016. Given a more reflective politician, it might be tempting to think that the experience of being silently countermanded and sabotaged by people from below would have made this incarnation of Trump not just older but wiser too. But Trump’s very chaotic style of handling his own personnel issues actually persisted during his temporary exile to Mar-a-Lago. The controversy surrounding the Heritage Foundation’s so-called “Project 2025” (the most important stated goal of which was to try and prepare any incoming Trump administration for a real showdown with the deep state) caused Trump to denounce it repeatedly, something which in turn led directly to the director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, resigning. The Machiavellian view of Trump’s treatment of his political loyalists is that the entire thing was a PR move to win the election. Surely, some of Project 2025’s ideas were a bit too kooky for comfort. By being denounced in public, they actually performed a worthwhile sacrifice to the greater cause, while whatever plans and preparations they wanted to make for a battle with the US state can be preserved and applied in due course.
But the other, far more realistic view of the Project 2025 debacle is that short-term political considerations empowered one faction of eunuchs inside the Trumpian forbidden city to – at least temporarily – wrest power away from another faction. Trump’s first term was defined by constant, bitter internal struggles about who would have the President’s ear, and the result was a constant churn of dismissals, resignations, cabinet shifts. For a while, a man like Steve Bannon enjoyed close access to Trump inside the West Wing, but his mutual loathing of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is a matter of public record (as well as the topic of a book written by Kushner himself). Kushner eventually won that showdown, and Bannon was sidelined. The fact that Kushner is fairly openly hated by most of Trump’s base, and Bannon is (if not exactly beloved) tolerated or even respected, did not matter much to the outcome. The real factor evident in the fate of Project 2025 isn’t so much that outside pressure (including from targeted Democratic political adverts which made rhetorical hay from initiative) exerts some particularly decisive influence inside Trump world. It is that the Trump world remains divided. Any excuse, any conceivable casus belli, is grounds for one group of courtiers to try to defenestrate the rival petitioners waiting patiently outside Trump’s office door.
This reading is only buttressed when one considers that Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 is not the only Trump-adjacent think tank dogged by controversy and internal conflicts. The America First Policy institute, a think tank ostensibly meant to nurture and deepen the sort of populist policy heresies that propelled Trump into the White House back in 2016, is a case in point. It has similarly been mired for years in a slow-rolling war of position between traditional establishment Republicans, as well as outright neocons, and converts to 2016-style populism. By all accounts, those populists are losing, and they have been losing for quite a while.
All this to say that a discussion of the threat posed by “the deep state” may very well be beside the point. Palatial intrigue, not the machinations of generals like Mark Milley, the then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who now regards Trump as “fascist to the core”, dominated the period between 2016 and 2021. The latter form of intrigue did happen, and it was at times quite serious, hinting at an ominous loss of the small-r republican tradition inside the American Republic. But even so, the struggles inside the Trump White House itself, not the struggles between that forbidden city and the rest of the state, was by far the defining factor at play. By all accounts, none of that has changed very much. At worst – and this actually quite likely – it has only gotten worse as Trump has gotten older, with the sycophants and power-brokers surrounding him given years in opposition to hone their craft.
What then, about the actual deep state? Here things have actually changed, but it is hard to say whether developments will benefit Trump or not. When Trump entered the Oval Office in 2016, he triggered a sort of auto-immune response from the political system. Trump was an outsider, a foreign object, and the US state apparatus and federal bureaucracy – like any healthy organism – sought various means to try to restore homeostasis. But that was in 2016. In 2024, the American empire is deeply, deeply sick, even to the point of slowly dying. The federal deficit has spun completely out of control. Not only is top-line US government debt almost at an eye-watering $36 trillion dollars (Russia’s national debt, for comparison, is at $288 billion and dropping). Interest payments on that debt have already skyrocketed beyond the total annual cost of the US military. But even that little factoid actually understates the problem: right now, federal debt servicing costs are quickly approaching a sum equivalent to a quarter of the total revenue of the US federal government.
The metaphor of a disease in the American body politic can be extended. When a human body is afflicted by cancer, healthy cells, functional cells, are slowly replaced by malignant cells. No human being, however, has ever gotten to the point where 100 per cent of their body is made up by cancer cells; the body stops working long before that. In the same way, no human government or political system will ever get to the point where 100 per cent of its incoming revenue is spent on debt servicing; the political system always collapses long before that. In 2022, less than 10 per cent of US federal revenue had to be spent on servicing the debt. Today, that figure sits at around 23 per cent, and it is rising fast. Meanwhile, other arms of the state are crumbling across the globe, with American imperial power in regions like the Middle East on the wane. Against this backdrop of acute crisis, it is a very open question whether the deep state will fight Trump in the same manner it did in 2016. Back then, the federal “immune system” put in an honest effort to expel the foreign intruder. Today, it might be too weakened by crisis to make much of an attempt.
But a weak “deep state” does not necessarily imply a state that is easy to control by Trump or anyone else. It might just as well imply a state that is fundamentally uncontrollable. Previous superpowers have exhibited similar symptoms. In 1789, on the eve of its catastrophic Revolution, France suffered from economic and military problems that placed it on the verge of bankruptcy. But it wasn’t bankrupt to the tune of an unpayable debt of $36 trillion, or spending an annual federal budget deficit approaching $2 trillion. Nor was it bankrupt while trying to maintain eleven nuclear aircraft carriers, military command staffs for every corner of the globe (as well as outer space), or nearly 800 military bases around the world. But even though France’s problems were on a smaller scale to America’s, France fell first to gridlock, then to rioting, then to revolution, because insofar as it had actually had a “deep state” in its primitive, absolutist form, that state had simply stopped working. France could not move forward, it could not go back, it could not go on as it was, but it could not reform itself either.
President-elect Donald Trump has as tough a row to hoe as Louis XVI ever did. Like Trump, Louis XVI was constantly plagued by internecine wars between those closest to him. His brothers, his wife, his various advisers, his ministers: all of them fought to be the one to control the King’s ear, and as one faction defeated the next, royal policy kept swinging wildly, until it fell away completely. Will Trump – or the people around him – recognise this danger and come together, putting factional interest or their ambitions for civil service reform aside in order to stabilise an imperial system now rapidly spinning out of control? The irony of any war Trump declares on the American “deep state” may ultimately be that the systems and institutions he wants to change have already ceased to properly function.
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